


Where The Vermin Play

by AceyEnn



Series: Served Promptly [18]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Homesickness, Loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-07 00:11:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6775960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceyEnn/pseuds/AceyEnn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I hide out in my corner, because I like my corner. I am happy where the vermin play."</p><p>Amethyst spends some time back home. Set sometime ambiguously before Greg met the Gems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where The Vermin Play

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "A Space Of One's Own."
> 
> Title is a Mountain Goats ref. :D

She’d just had a nasty fight with Pearl, and in her anger, she warped to the place that was all hers. Because for all its emptiness, for all the awfulness that had occurred there, there was something Amethyst found comforting about the Kindergarten.

 

It was home to her. Even if she’d spent the past four thousand years (give or take) living in the temple with the other Crystal Gems, with a room of her own and everything, the Kindergarten was  _ special _ .

 

The walk to her hole was brief--it was close to the warp pad, for better or for worse. She curled up inside it, breathing in the scent of dirt and dust and finding nothing but comfort in it.

 

The hole was a bit big for her, in her current form. She’d discovered several hundred years ago that people gave more leeway to young children, and had spent those years in the form of a young girl. She’d experimented with other forms in the past, of course--animals, mostly, but also a brief stint as what humans would consider a man--but this one...for now, at least, it felt right. It felt  _ safe _ , just as the Kindergarten felt safe, even if it made her hole feel more like a cave than anything else.

 

Amethyst looked over the walls to the cave. In her youth, insofar as a Gem could be considered to have one, she’d spend hours drawing on them with mud, scratching into the yielding dirt with sharp sticks. A few of those doodles still remained; a few self-portraits, but mostly drawings of the local fauna. The birds that flew overhead, the snakes that slithered across the ground, the rats and moles that would burrow into her space.

 

Vermin, Pearl would call them--a disdainful term. But Amethyst never viewed them as intruders. To her, they were friends. Companions. Things-- _ beings _ \--that she could talk to.

 

(She didn’t know how to talk very well before Rose and the others took her in, but what little she knew was more than enough back then.)

 

She leaned back against the wall, frowning. Why did Pearl have to yell and fuss at her about everything? So what if there was mud all over her pants, or dirt beneath her fingernails, or food spilled down her front? Why did any of that  _ matter _ ?

 

Maybe Pearl thought she was vermin too. Maybe Garnet and even Rose felt the same way. Maybe she really was a parasite.

 

Amethyst hated that thought, and yet she couldn’t shake it. Not here. Not where all the bad things happened.

 

Tears sprung to her eyes, and she stood up and walked back to the warp pad, hesitating slightly before stepping on it and warping back to the temple. She couldn’t stay there, not with those terrible thoughts lingering in her mind.

 

“Amethyst, you’ve been gone for hours!” Rose exclaimed as Amethyst appeared back in the temple. The larger Gem hugged her tightly. “We were all so worried…”

 

“I just...I wanted to be alone. Didn’t wanna talk to anyone.” She couldn’t stop the tears. “You guys think I’m bad. I’m a mistake.”

 

Rose shushed her. “You’re not a mistake, dear. And you’re very, very good. I know you need to be alone sometimes...just tell me next time, okay? I was scared you’d been hurt.”

 

Amethyst hugged Rose back, and Rose smiled. Even though she was getting dirt all over her dress, she smiled.

 

“If you want,” Rose said, “I’ll tell Pearl and Garnet not to bother you. I won’t bother you either. You can just go to your room and relax, okay? Does that sound nice?”

 

Amethyst nodded. It did sound nice.

 

She headed into her room, breathed in the smell of water and mildew and rotten food, and thought to herself that maybe, just maybe,  _ this _ was where she belonged.

  
_ This _ was her space.


End file.
